Floppy Disks are as dead as most of the things for sale at the “deli” counter at the local asian market. Things have been bleak for our friend the floppy ever since the 1998 introduction of the CD-ROM only iMac. Since then, the introduction of USB thumbdrives and several thousand varieties of memory cards have put nails in the coffin, encased it in cement and buried it in the landfill (you know, the one where they buried all those old Atari games).
While few of us ever interact with actual physical floppy disks anymore, every damn day I see the floppy icon liberally scattered across the menu’s, toolbars and buttons of the applications I use. Above, you can see a portion of a screenshot from Microsoft’s new Office 12 Word application.
Let’s see:
- New “Ribbon” Interface: check
- New “Menu Reduction” in place: check
- Same fricking floppy disk icon since Windows 3.1: check
The lone holdout to this floppy spreading menace is OS X. Where (possibly as a result of the aforementioned floppy killing iMac introduction) there are a minimum of toolbars and the menu’s aren’t tarted up with extra icons. As Samuel Jackson would say: “It’s sleek MOTHERF**CKER!” (though it remains a mystery to me how he is able to pronounce those astericks with such diction). It’s also interesting to note that the OS X floppy is oriented 180 degrees from the ones I found on my Linux and Windows systems. My guess is that Apple wanted the icon to match the orientation you would use for actually putting it in the disk drive.
Which leads me to my question: “Should the floppy icon remain? What icon could possibly replace the floppy disk on the toolbars’ of our lives?” Some flash chip? A fist holding a USB thumbdrive? Some generic: “Removable Storage” icon? Until we as start taking some responsibility for dealing with this issue, we will continue to suffer the tyrrany and oppression of a slightly smudged blue square, with what could be a metal bit on the one side.
WHAT TO DO NOW?